Report: Schools Must Teach Britain Is an ‘Immigration Nation’ to Fight Islamophobia

Matt Cardy/Getty Images19 Nov 2017

The government should empower NGOs and race activists to police the media to ensure ethnic minorities are not portrayed in a bad light, and the school curriculum must be changed so that every child is taught Britain has no native population, according to a new report on Islamophobia.

In Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All, “race relations” think tank the Runnymede Trust alleges that “anti-Muslim racism” is responsible for all inequalities between Muslims and other groups in Britain “across a range of outcomes, from health, housing and environment to education, employment and criminal justice”.

Lamenting that Muslims are subject to “demonisation” and “racial stereotyping” in Britain, one of the report’s 10 main recommendations is that the press and media be overhauled to ensure that news coverage is produced so as not to fuel negative perceptions of minority ethnic or religious groups.

A press regulator should “investigate the prevalence of Islamophobia, racism and hatred espoused in the press”. which would not only look at the accuracy of coverage, but also examine whether “individual stories have wider negative effects on whole ethnic groups, and on wider social attitudes”, according to the report.

As well as urging the press and wider media establish ethnic diversity quota targets for their journalists, editors, and senior management, the Trust writes that politicians must show “greater accountability for the impact on race relations of negative media coverage … of minority ethnic and religious groups.”

To this end, it recommends the government set up a team of people from “race equality NGOs”, local authorities, and media practitioners “to initiate new strategies to combat racial prejudice in the media and negative public perceptions of minority ethnic groups”.

The report commends the Home Office’s commitment in its 2016 Hate Crime Action Plan, to “[prevent] hate crime by challenging the beliefs and attitudes underpinning such crimes and to working with young people and schools,” but adds: “This must involve addressing the core curriculum and ensuring the history of migration is taught effectively.”

Linking to Our Migration Story, a government-funded “educational resource” developed by the Runnymede Trust and academics to accompany a new GSCE history module offered to students since 2016, the report implies that all schools should have to teach the contents of the module which — developed by a Marxist academic — alleges Africans were in Britain before the English, and has been described as “disturbing” and “dangerous”.

Our Migration Story states that the UK is a nation of constant migrations with no indigenous population, whose “wealth and power” came only as the result of “the exploitation of the world’s resources and its people”.

British imperialism is to blame for the existence of racism today, according to the website, which highlights hundreds of stories of intolerance, racism, and oppression in the UK’s history and was created to counter “the resurgence of increasingly narrow, nationalistic, expressions of national identity”, according to its creators.

When it was unveiled last year, critics slammed the politicisation evident in the new ‘Migration to Britain’ GCSE course, the literature of which states: “This course will enable students to learn how the movement of people – European, African, Asian – to and from these islands has shaped the story of this nation for thousands of years.”

Antony Beevor, the military historian and author, said: “Migration is a very valid area to study, but if it’s a question of rewriting history to bolster the morale of certain sections of the population, rather than a scrupulous attitude towards facts, then that is a total distortion and it’s outrageous.”

Prof Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, a specialist adviser to the Commons Education Committee, said: “This seems to be aimed more at indoctrination than education. It is dangerous because a cohesive society depends on an authentic shared view of history.”

Author and Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul added: “This absurd supposition of Africans inhabiting Britain before the English only goes to show how our once esteemed centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, have been insidiously eroded by a dangerous dogma that, very like IS today, wrought misery and havoc in Russia, China and the Eastern bloc, where for all practical purposes it has failed.”